NSA's spying program questioned during UGA forum discussion

Lee Shearer @LeeShearer

Tuesday

Feb 25, 2014 at 9:15 PM

The National Security Agency appears to be systematically invading Americans' privacy with a massive digital spying program, but who will care and what should be done about it was the focus of a forum at the University of Georgia Tuesday evening.

Americans have certain privacy rights written in the U.S. Constitution, but those protections were written long before email and cyberspace existed, UGA law professor Christina Mulligan said during the forum. Former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden leaked documents to reporters revealing the agency's widespread surveillance of Americans and foreigners alike, and he seems to have bent the law in justifying its spying, Mulligan said.

But existing law and precedent were written in a time when issues raised by the NSA programs didn't exist. If federal or local police want to search your house for evidence or contraband, they have to convince a judge there's a good reason you have evidence or contraband, Mulligan said.

They can't say, "I'd like to search University of Georgia dormitories because college kids often have illegal drugs," she said.

But there are exceptions, such as crossing borders, she said. For example, an email sent from Athens to Atlanta might cross borders because the way email moves across the web, and copies of it might end up in a Yahoo or Google server in another country, in case servers somewhere else go down.

The documents Snowden leaked, often items such as Powerpoint presentations, don't always give a clear idea of the extent of government domestic spying.

For that reason "there's a lot of ambiguity about what the NSA is doing," Mulligan said.

But the agency seems to have been bending the law too, she said.

"It's been hard to challenge a lot of the things in court because people didn't know about them," she said.

Kang Li, a UGA computer science professor and an expert in data security, reinforced a point Mulligan made - another thing different in today's world is it's easy to gather people's information.

Often it's voluntarily shared, such as personal information provided when signing up to play Angry Birds.

Companies often sell information to third parties, such as companies who want to offer advertising about similar games.

Cell phones and personal devices also store and share information, said Li, noting recent revelations about hackers who found ways to bypass a computer's security system, even to the extent of hijacking a built-in camera to record what the user is doing.

And it can get worse, said Li, who called this the "golden age of surveillance."

"The protection of privacy is pretty challenging," Li said. "If they want to know about you, they're going to find you and they're going to know everything about you."

There could be generational differences in attitudes about privacy, Li said; younger people don't seem concerned about the government gathering and analyzing the kind of personal data they already share on their devices.

But even though social norms have changed, people still have an expectation of privacy, Mulligan said.